Verisimilitude – Afterthought 13

A seemingly neverending theme in what we do is books that evaluate Gary Gygax’s grand vision of a game that is meant to be played as a big game in a gamely way by gamers, and say “You know the problem with this is that it’s a game. We can fix that!” So this week we talk briefly about games as physics engines, games as games, and games as simulators. Then we give up on that and talk about film franchises and the worst decades.

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13 responses to “Verisimilitude – Afterthought 13”

It’s never bothered me that a game has to be playable. Concessions for playability are a thing that should totally exist. However the world works out, if it happens that fighters and wizards are both equally competent and armor degradation isn’t a thing that matters, then so much the better. An imaginary world can be any way we imagine it, so why shouldn’t it be balanced and interesting?

Where I draw the line is on sacrificing verisimilitude purely for the sake of narrative enforcement. Being awesome isn’t cool when the only reason you’re awesome is because you’re the protagonist. And that’s doubly true when there are no rules given for how non-protagonists interact with the world. If a rule only exists purely to spite the Sim crowd, then I’m going to take offense at that.

Black Widow’s thing in Avengers 2 has more nuance than that. She doesn’t feel monstrous because she’s infertile, it’s because having kids is a human thing and that was taken from her to make her a more efficient and ruthless killer. It’s understandable that she feels like the Red Room made her into a monster – that’s what they were trying to do. She’s wrong and they didn’t, but that’s where character development starts. With detrimental misconceptions that the character overcomes.

I liked that you brought up Shakespeare with your “jester” archetype. He had some of the best ones – I thought of Mercutio right away. I actually used that archetype in a game I ran – the exiled prince’s best friend. Worked very well.

What kind of uncanny memory do you guys have that you can pull out Pirates of Dark Water curse words out of nowhere?! It just blows my mind. I mean, I loved that cartoon, watched it again some years back as an adult, and still couldn’t pull those words out if my life depended on it! How the hell do you do it?

Jef carefully prunes his memory so that he can remember every useless thing about long-forgotten cartoons while ensuring that he can remember actual people’s names at a rate that would be pretty amazing for a dog or a bag of onions to do, but is deeply unimpressive in a human.